Michael Clark heads toward the courtroom with family and friends at the Boulder County Justice Center on Wednesday. Clark is accused of the 1994 murder of Boulder city worker Marty Grisham. (MARK LEFFINGWELL)

A Boulder jury spent most of the third day of Michael Clark's murder trial listening to a three-hour tape of an interview Clark gave three detectives in which he continually denies involvement in the shooting of Marty Grisham.

The interview -- which took place Nov. 3, 1994, two days after the homicide -- was conducted by Cmdr. Kurt Weiler, Sgt. Tom Trujillo and Cmdr. Carey Weinheimer, all of whom were Boulder police detectives at the time.

Grisham, 48, the city of Boulder's director of information services, was gunned down at his apartment Nov. 1, 1994, after answering a knock at the door.

The taped interview -- played for the jury Friday -- took place after Clark, then 19, was arrested on suspicion of stealing checks from Grisham. In the tape, Clark immediately admits to the check fraud when asked about it, but he denies any involvement in the shooting.

The detectives point out that with Grisham possibly on to the check fraud, Clark had motive to shoot him.

"Who's going to benefit the most from shooting Mr. Grisham?" Weiler asks in the tape. "Who else would benefit from Mr. Grisham being shot and killed?"

Weiler can be heard talking to Clark about his hopes of joining the Marines and how getting caught for check fraud on top of his previous arrest for motorcycle theft would ruin that dream. Grisham had filed a police report the day before he was shot, and Clark -- a friend of Grisham's daughter -- was one of the suspects in the case.

"Was Marty Grisham an obstacle to you joining the Marines?" Weiler asks, to which Clark replies, "No, sir."

When asked why he threw away the rest of the checks and called the credit union, Clark says he was worried his theft was affecting Grisham's credit rating, something he didn't want to do.

But the detectives tell Clark they think he knew he was about to get caught. One of the detectives can be heard saying, "I have a hard time believing a 19-year-old gives a (expletive) about someone's credit rating."

But Clark continues to say his conscience was the reason he stopped writing checks and that he did not think Grisham was on to him yet.

"You can't get in my head and know what I was thinking," Clark can be heard saying. "I understand it's your job, but that's not how it is, not how it is at all. I don't know anything about what happened to Mr. Grisham. I stole his checks, I admit that. But I don't know anything about what happened to him."

On cross-examination Friday, defense attorney Nelissa Milfeld asked Weiler why Clark -- who quickly admits on the tape to the check fraud -- would have continued to deny the shooting if he was involved, in the face of constant pressure from detectives.

"He never confessed at all to being involved?" she asked Weiler, who agreed that Clark did not.

The missing gun

No gun was ever found in the Grisham murder case. In the 1994 interview, the detectives keep asking Clark about a 9mm gun that his recruiting officer, Marine Sgt. Ron Weyer, said Clark had before the shooting.

"Whether or not Mr. Clark was involved hinged on finding that gun," Weiler testified Friday. "Things were not looking good for him, and the gun could have been his ticket out."

On the tape, Clark tells detectives that he drove to Montbello a few weeks before the shooting to pick up some car stereo equipment from someone his friend recommended. The seller -- whom Clark said he only knew as "Luis" -- got into his car, showed him a 9mm and asked him if he wanted to buy it. Clark says he replied no but that Luis left the gun in the car by accident.

Clark then tells the detectives he showed the gun to Weyer to impress him, since Clark was under the impression Weyer was disappointed with him after a previous arrest for stealing a motorcycle.

"I was trying to impress Sgt. Weyer," Clark says on the tape. "I let him down with the motorcycle thing."

Clark then says the gun "scared" him, so he drove down to Denver to try to return it to Luis. He was unable to find him, so he says he gave the gun to a random person he saw.

"I wanted to get rid of that gun," he tells the detectives.

Weiler tells Clark on the tape he doubts someone smart enough to commit the check fraud would do something like give a gun away to a random person a week after finding it in his car.

"Here's a guy who came straight about the checks and did some smart things with the check fraud," Weiler can be heard saying. "So now you have this gun and you do all this ... it doesn't add up."

Clark, though, on the tape stands by the story.

"As ludicrous as it may seem ... that's how it happened," Clark says. "I appreciate you calling me smart ... but I wasn't thinking straight."

According to an arrest affidavit, evidence came to light in 2010 that Clark and a friend arranged for someone to buy them 9mm guns from a pawn shop in Aurora.

On the tape, Weiler can be heard continually asking Clark if he was covering for someone or if there were more people involved in the case.

"Right now, you're in the hot seat all by yourself," he says on the tape. "I don't think that's right. I don't think you should be taking the heat for it."

Detectives also ask Clark about Kristen Grisham and whether she was involved in any way. The detectives point out she did not appear to be to upset by her father's death, and that she would stand to split the inheritance with her brother, Loren.

Clark says he never talked to Kristen much about her father, that she was not involved in the check fraud and he does not believe she was involved in the shooting.

"I can't imagine for the life of me she would have had anything to do with it," he says.

A partial DNA match

Yvonne Woods, a DNA analyst for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, took the stand to answer questions about a test on a jar of Carmex lip balm found outside Marty Grisham's apartment the day after he was shot.

Woods said while DNA testing was not available in 1994 when the shooting occurred, when the case was reopened Boulder police sent the jar to be re-examined for DNA. Some DNA was recovered from the inside the jar.

According to Woods, the sample -- while degraded -- contained one major male contributor. When the DNA profile was compared to Clark, it was a partial match, meaning the test theoretically excluded about 99 percent of the population but did not exclude Clark.

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